


Dead Space

by Minutia_R



Series: A Wormhole Jump to Tuonela [2]
Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Alternate Universe - Space Opera, Alternate Universe - Vorkosigan Saga Fusion, Ambiguous Character Death, Gen, Post-Chapter 16, medical gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-02
Updated: 2017-09-02
Packaged: 2018-12-23 01:32:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11979291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Minutia_R/pseuds/Minutia_R
Summary: Emil and Lalli, drifting in the middle of nowhere ... IN SPACE.





	Dead Space

**Author's Note:**

> If you're not familiar with the Vorkosigan Saga, you will be missing a few references, but you should be able to get the basic gist if you read this as a general space opera AU. Just a note about Emil's pronouns--in this universe, I've made him a Betan Hermaphrodite, a group who in canon use it pronouns. I suspect the author would have made a different choice if the series had first been published today, rather than the first book coming out in 1986. Regardless, since I've taken a few liberties with canon anyway, I've decided to go with them pronouns instead.

“Help,” Emil whispered, and then waited, hardly daring to breathe, as if there was really someone or something out there listening that would answer.

Of course, nothing did. So Emil shouted Lalli’s name again, pinched his shoulder, felt his throat and wrists and chest with no more result than they’d had a few seconds ago. Time. How much time did Lalli have? Three minutes? Or was that drowning? Ten? Not enough. Not any to spare. Fingers shaking, Emil undid the restraints on the pilot’s seat and all of Lalli’s slight weight fell into their arms. It was like holding a block of ice. Another mystery. _You’re not dead until you’re warm and dead_ , Dr. Naismith had said in the first aid course Emil had taken back in Quartz.

They weren’t going to lose Lalli too. At least Lalli had left behind a body, even if Emil didn’t understand why it wasn’t breathing and didn’t have a pulse. Even if Emil didn’t understand anything of what had just happened. Lalli guiding the ship through jump after jump, faster than Emil had thought possible, muttering under his breath in a strange language, his eyes glowing as blue as his implant. Then, Emil had been prepared to believe every crazy story they’d ever heard about Barrayaran savages. And afterwards, the ship had come to a stop, the nav comp showing no traces of their pursuers or any clue to where they were. Nothing around. Dead space. And Lalli slumped forward in his restraints, not breathing.

At least the ship they’d salvaged had a working cryo-chamber. Emil desperately wished they’d paid more attention in that first aid course instead of messing around with the resurrection dummy trying to get a laugh out of that brown-eyed transfer student from Silica and barely squeaking by with a passing grade on the test. It wasn’t like they’d ever need it, they’d thought back then. They weren’t a medic or anything. But now Mikkel was all those jumps away, if he was even still alive, and Emil was all Lalli had.

Wounds. They were supposed to check for wounds. Emil laid Lalli out on the floor by the cryo-chamber, loosening his clothes, skin crawling at how limp and unresponsive the body was. There was nothing, no reason Lalli should be this way. Emil did find a knife at Lalli’s belt, the sheath made of the kind of leather that had once been the skin of a living animal, the hilt wrapped in the same material. Tuuri’s Vorfemme knife, the one she’d inherited from her grandmother and left behind with everything else when she’d walked out of an airlock. Emil didn’t know that Lalli had been carrying it--it wasn’t right for a man to use, he’d said.

Well. Good thing Emil wasn’t a man. If there weren’t any wounds, they had to make some. They drew the knife and made two cuts on either side of Lalli’s windpipe. A trickle of blood seeped feebly from each cut, and Emil swallowed down their gorge, tasted bile, kept going. They could throw up later. They could pass out later.

Fumbling with the tubes on the jug of cryofluid, Emil got them hooked up properly--they hoped--one to pump the cryofluid into the body, the other one to collect the blood that was forced out. It took an agonizing couple of minutes where Emil couldn’t do anything but listen to the pump, bite their nails, watch the bags fill with blood and not pass out yet. Then they lifted Lalli and his stored blood into the cryochamber and sealed it.

They’d done everything right. It had to be good enough. As soon as they got Lalli to a proper hospital--

And there it was, the thought that all of Emil’s frantic activity had been an exercise in avoiding. They weren’t getting to a proper hospital. No one was going to be able to track where they’d gone--Lalli had made sure of that. And Emil couldn’t go anywhere by themself, because Emil wasn’t a jump pilot. They were going to drift here, in a salvaged junker next to the frozen corpse of their friend, until they starved to death.

Now would be a good time to pass out. But Emil didn’t, just sat on the bloodstained floor with their head in their hands until they heard an alert from the proximity sensors.

It was a malfunction, nothing else, the nav comp on this ship was a glitchy piece of garbage anyway, but Emil banged their elbow and knee in their rush to get to it, banging on the comm board in a hopeless attempt to get it to work.

“We saw your distress beacon, _Flotsam_.” For a fraction of a second before the viewscreen burst into static, Emil saw a short, chubby figure, so deceitfully familiar that their chest felt tight. “This is the _Lumilinen_ , Tuuri Vorhotakainen, commanding.”

It couldn’t be. But there was no mistaking that cheerful voice or its odd musical accent. “You’re dead,” Emil blurted out, thinking as soon as the words left their mouth how stupid they were, how any second Tuuri was going to laugh and explain how she’d miraculously survived. Then the viewscreen flickered to life again, and the man in the pilot’s seat next to Tuuri had nothing but loose wires where his implant should be, and the dog resting its head on her knee--Emil had put a nerve disrupter to that head themself. “You’re all dead.”

“Yep,” said Tuuri. “Don’t you know the expression ‘Take a wormhole jump to Tuonela’? ‘Cause it looks like you have. Still don’t believe that Lalli’s more than an ordinary jump-pilot?”

At the moment, Emil couldn’t care less whether Lalli was the Dowager Empress of Cetaganda. “He’s not breathing, Tuuri. I had to drain all the blood out of his body, and he--” At that point an awful thought hit Emil and they finished in a much smaller voice, “Are we dead too?”

“Ah … not yet,” said Tuuri, with the slight frown she always used to get when she was trying to figure out how to put the best spin on bad news. “But the Swan gets really tetchy when there are living creatures in her domain, and there’s a pretty straightforward way to solve that, so … fortunately, I managed to persuade her that I could get you out of her feathers with much less fuss and paperwork, for a small fee.”

“For a small fee?” Emil couldn’t decide whether they were more offended by the small part or the fee part. It wasn’t like they wanted to be here. “So you’re … what now? Dead mercenaries?”

“We’re not something wriggling with too many legs that you found in your sleeping bag,” said Tuuri. “The proper tone of voice is _Dead mercenaries!_ \--with a glad cry.”

**Author's Note:**

> I guess Cordelia's mom was teaching a bunch of feckless kids first aid and the use of emergency medical equipment as a volunteer thing?
> 
> Anyway, this story grew out of a [a tumblr post](http://minutia-r.tumblr.com/post/164824823220/so-last-night-as-i-was-going-to-sleep-i-was) I made about the possibility of a Vorkosigan Saga AU for SSSS. When cognetine reblogged it with the tag **#now I'm crying about Tuuri's Tuonela ragtag band of mercenaries that she's obviously accrued** I really had no choice but to write this.
> 
> I cannot take credit for Tuuri's final line; Miles said it first.


End file.
